EV start-up featured at low-emissions-vehicles event

With its bank balance recharged, U.K.-based electric-vehicle start-up Detroit Electric is to detail its product plans during its initial appearance at Cenex Low Carbon Vehicles 2017.

The 10th annual event, to be held Sept. 6-7 at Millbrook, Bedfordshire, is organized by Cenex, an independent not-for-profit consultancy specializing in the delivery of projects, supporting innovation and market development of low-carbon vehicles and infrastructure.

Richie Frost, company director and chief technical officer, says the company will use Cenex to announce its plans to launch a range of all-electric passenger vehicles after the recent injection of $1.8 billion from a joint venture agreement.

Detroit Electric is conducting a recruitment drive to fill 150 to 200 posts by next spring.

“Having secured the solid financial foundation to embark on our business plan, we’re now building up our team to enable us to deliver our ambitious vehicle-engineering programs,” Frost says in a statement.

Frost says the company will invest significantly to expand its engineering and manufacturing center in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, to create a state-of-the art R&D facility.

Meantime, Cenex says the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, a joint policy unit of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Transport, will showcase some of the connected- and autonomous-vehicle technologies being developed.

These include StreetWise, GATEway and DRIVEN.

The StreetWise consortium, led by FiveAl, will develop and demonstrate technology, safety, insurance and service models for delivering a highly automated mobility-as-a-service aimed at replacing the commuter car.

GATEway (Greenwich Automated Transport Environment) is an £8 million ($10.4 million) research project working on the technical, legal and societal challenges of implementing automated vehicles in an urban environment. The project will test and validate a series of use cases for automated vehicles, including driverless shuttles and automated urban deliveries.

The DRIVEN consortium will deploy a fleet of autonomous vehicles in urban areas and on motorways, culminating in multiple end-to-end journeys between London and Oxford. It is led by Oxbotica and funded by InnovateUK and the industry. The fleet will run at Level 4 autonomy, performing all safety-critical driving functions with zero-passenger occupancy.

CargoPod is a last-mile delivery vehicle developed by Oxbotica that made the U.K.’s first driverless grocery deliveries as part of the GATEway project.

“We are experiencing a very exciting period of motor industry innovation,” Cenex CEO Robert Evans says in a statement. “One of the key emerging opportunities is that of integrating